More on nutrition (or is that moron nutrition?)
Yesterday I talked about my weight and my fitness goals. My position at the time was that I’m doing a whole lot of exercise, so maybe I should just let the nutrition thing slide and continue to do the things that are maintaining my weight, but not allowing it to drop.
But the more I think about it, the less defensible that position is. As I stated, I’m training or teaching martial arts around nine hours per week. And I think I’m going to make an honest attempt to continue with the P90x program. Today was the Plyometrics workout, which is a 58-minute DVD of jumping around in different ways. (Side note: one of the four doing the workout on the DVD has a prosthetic lower right leg, which astounds me.) I’m sore from yesterday’s chest/back/ab workout, but I’m not dead from it. Tonight I did the hour-long plyometrics, then went to the dojang for a black belt TKD class (thankfully mostly hand techniques), then I stayed for the Kali class (which, unfortunately for my tired legs, had plenty of footwork drills).
Back at the ranch (as one of my college professors loved to say), the fact is that if I’m going to add an daily hour-long workout to my martial arts routine and I’m also going to play tennis hopefully once or twice per week, I’m starting to push 20 hours per week of exercise. And I can’t be bothered to spend maybe an hour or two per week researching nutrition and meal planning? That doesn’t seem to make much sense.
Part of my mental hangup with changing my diet is not feeling sure that I know what direction to go. There has been so much misinformation over the years regarding nutrition, that it is tough to feel confident in anything I read. Among the martial arts blogs I read, there have been two nutrition programs that have stood out with positive reviews: Precision Nutrition and Fat Loss Troubleshoot/Metabolic Repair Manual. Sometimes all those testimonials seem over the top, but I think I’d have a much higher level of confidence following one of those programs than trying to do my own thing (which is working soooo well for me). Both of those programs are much more expensive than a simple diet book, but they both come with plenty of extras that should make it worth my while.
So I’ll mull over it a bit longer, and almost certainly come to the conclusion that if I’m willing to spend hundreds of dollars on exercise videos, that $77 or $97 isn’t too much to pay for something that has the potential to fundamentally alter my diet for the better.
Hi! I’m no expert on nutrition or exercise (or anything else for that matter) but I have long come to the conclusion that fatness and fitness are mutually exclusive things. From people I have met during my life I have realised that you can be fat and fit, fat and unfit, thin and fit or thin and unfit! Because they are mutually exclusive events they need to be tackled seperately. No amount of exercise will make you thin – it will just make you fit and hungry! There is also such a thing as overtraining as well – are you guilty of that? To get thinner you have to behave like a thin person does (they seem to know what to do). I am a thin person (by choice not just design)and if it is of any value to you here is how I do it: I always eat breakfast (2 rounds of toast with marmalade but no butter, a banana, glass of orange juice and a coffee). For lunch I eat a sandwich, a few pringles, cherry tomatoes and an apple (I do vary this occasionally). For dinner I cook a meal of whatever I fancy – pasta, stir fry, curry, it doesn’t really matter to much what it is as long as I restrict the portion size. Try eating two-thirds of what you normally eat. I rarely snack between meals and luckily I don’t have a sweet tooth so I rarely eat cakes or biscuits. It’s all about eating regular meals, controlling portion size and cutting down on snacking. Don’t cut out all your favourite foods – life has to be worth living! I also weight myself every 2 weeks. If my weight has gone up by more than 2 pounds I restrict myself the following week – it’s not as daunting to lose 2 pounds as 20 pounds. There is nothing I wouldn’t eat because it’s ‘fattening’. All things in moderation as mother used to say! Good luck.